The world loves pork, and that’s not just a wild guess. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (via the U.S. Department of Agriculture), it claims a solid 36% of the world’s total meat consumption, surpassing poultry and beef at 33% and 24%, respectively. And honestly, who could blame pork lovers? Just imagine the incredible smell of tender, juicy, easy slow cooker pulled pork, or perhaps a rack of sizzling, fall-off-the-bone, oven-baked BBQ baby back ribs with homemade sauce spreading from your kitchen.
All the recipe talk aside, while you might have considered pork as your go-to white meat for the week, here’s something that might surprise you: It’s not actually white meat. As a matter of fact, its white meat reputation began as a clever National Pork Board marketing campaign (“Pork. The Other White Meat”) that aimed to boost pork sales in 1987. But this couldn’t be further from the truth, and it has a lot to do with a little protein called myoglobin that’s responsible for giving the meat its red color. So, what exactly is myoglobin, and why does it make pork a red meat?
Myoglobin and red meat
Pork contains 0.2% myoglobin, which is purplish in its natural state but turns into oxymyoglobin when mixed with oxygen to give meat its bright red color. The higher the myoglobin content, the deeper and darker the meat. Since pork contains significantly more myoglobin than chicken or fish, it belongs in the same category as beef (which has the most myoglobin), lamb, and goat. If you’re still not convinced about pork being red meat, think about how pigs are farm animals and considered livestock. Since the USDA classifies all livestock as red meat, that kind of makes it a done deal.
Regardless of all the scientific reasoning, cooking traditions (and the ’80s marketing campaign) have a lot to do with the confusion about pork’s identity. From a culinary perspective, white meat refers to meat that isn’t typically red and has a lighter color before or after cooking. This is actually a huge part of why chefs around the world treat it as white meat. If you really give it a thought, it’s not that different from how we call tomatoes, eggplants and cucumbers vegetables when they’re actually fruits. Despite this decades-long debate, pork is absolutely delicious, especially if you know the best cuts of pork to buy for flavorful steaks. Hence, a trip to the butcher’s is all that stands between you and a mouthwatering piece of pork that’s just impossible to say no to.
